Post navigation

How-to: subscribe to all the TWD blogs

Ok now on to business. I know that some members have expressed an interest in trying to streamline reading TWD blogs. If you are like me and try to hit up every blog every week, its very time consuming to read each blog since we have members from different time zones, who like to post at different times during Tuesdays, post late, or skip the particular week etc etc.

Myself (Clara from I♥food4thought) and fellow TWDer, Shari from Whisk: a food blog, have been working on her blogroll idea for the last 2 weeks to make it as easy as possible for all techie levels to understand. Let’s all pause and give Shari a *golf clap* right now. Do iiiiiiiiit. LOL

If you want to import to google reader:
1. Log into your GR acct
2. Manage subscriptions (left column, scroll towards the bottom)
3. Import/export tab
* Just an FYI, if you import to GR all your TWD subscriptions will be mixed in with your current subscriptions. Since I have multiple gmail accts, to keep TWD separate, I use a different gmail acct/google reader and import to that one instead of my main one *or* another idea would be going through them one-by-one and putting into a TWD folder that you can create yourself.

EDIT: Shari via comments says she’s now separated the TWD blogs export link into its own folder so that should avoid mixing with your current subscriptions when you import to your reader! w00t! Shari rocks :)

At this time we only have problems with adding Helen Brain since there seems to be no feed available. Helen, I think you’ll have to fix that on your end.

We tried to check the TWD bloglines list many times but if we have missed your blog, please let us know and we’ll add you ASAP!

Also… Don’t worry! We haven’t forgotten about our new members! Shari has graciously offered to provide a bloglines export link at the end of the week that I will post within the new members post so that you will be able to add new members before the Tuesday posting day. Another *golf clap* for Shari!

By subscribing to the content in a blog (called a feed), you are notified of new information when it’s posted. This means that content is delivered to you as it becomes available. It’s supposed to be simple: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.

What is a reader?

A reader is a central location that collects all the information from the various web sites you’ve subscribed to, like a personal newspaper. Readers have a variety of names: feed readers, feed aggregators, news reader, or aggregator. Wikipedia lists all the different feed readers at this link.

Client readers versus web-based readers

There are readers that are applications on your desktop (called a client application) or there are web-based readers. Popular desktop readers include Amphetadesk, FeedReader, and NewsGator. Popular web-based readers include Bloglines, My Yahoo, and Google Reader.

Benefits of subscribing

You’ll be able to quickly click through the different TWD blogs to find out how they fared on this week’s recipe. You won’t have to open new tabs or windows unless you want to see the post in the original blog. If you want to comment, some blogs require you to be viewing their original blog (not in a reader).

You can keep up-to-date with all the posts of TWD bloggers.

If you want to see only the TWD post, you can mark all blogs as read the day before (in your reader). Then, any new posts are marked as unread. This makes it easier to view the participants for the week.

CB really how much work did you do? Be honest now. I think you took the 30 seconds to import into your GR. Haha Shari is the one who did all the work stop trying to steel her credit. And enough of the blog pimping. Geeze :P

I have an easier option — have been meaning to post it on the food blog school but haven’t — if someone would like to e-mail me, I’m happy to tell you how to set it up. That way there’ll be no more keeping-up-to-date issues.

I hope everyone finds this helpful if they give it a whirl. I’ve put all the feeds in Bloglines into a folder so that when you import them they will be in their own folder in your reader. That should avoid the issue CB ran into with the TWD blogs mixed in with other blogs subscribed to. Let me know if there are other problems!

This is FABULOUS! I try so hard to get to all the blogs each week, but my schedule doesn’t always permit. This will help make sure I look at and comment on everyone’s blog who takes the time to complete the recipes. Great work ladies, I am truly grateful for all your work on this site.

just want to say i imported into GR and everything worked fine. on my way to check out every one’s PBT now! again, MERCI!! (shouldn’t someone let the DB know about this? or are we like the anti-DB club, mwwahahaha).

RACHEL, i am not sure what happened. Do you have your google reader set to only see the updated blogs? Maybe thats why only 4 are showing up for you right now. If you click the (+) next to the folder it will show you all the blogs (hopefully). Let me know if you need more help!

Here is an answer to people that think they might be missing blogs (perhaps their own) in the TWD/Bloglines list.

If you had a previous subscription with Bloglines (or another reader) and imported the TWD list into it, you will not be able to see the TWD’s blogs that you ALREADY had in your previous list.

If you had already subscribed to a blog’s feed in your “everyday” Bloglines’ list and the blog repeats itself from in TWD list, then it’s only because they had different feeds (you can check feeds addresses by pressing “EDIT SUBSCRIPTION” when on the Bloglines page of a specific blog).

You see, there are many different FEEDS a blog can have: RSS, XML, Feed burner, etc… So if a you had already subscribed to one through Bloglines before the TWD, and the TWD list contains the same blog attached to the same feed… then it won’t appear in your TWD list.

If that bothers you, try to find a different feed for this blog and enter it in the TWD list.

ISABELLE, I know Vibi already emailed me that she figured out why already but I figure I’ll just post for other members too. On the bloglines export list La Casserole (Vibi) and Culinary Concoctions (Peabody) are there. I am not as familiar with bloglines as google reader but when I import the file to my google reader all the previous TWDers that I had in my google reader got moved to a TWD folder that the export files created and there were no duplicates. But if anyone that has bloglines could enlighten us about how duplicate blogs are being imported that would be great since Vibi thinks the reason why her blog isn’t appearing when she imports is b/c its already on her bloglines.

I understand about different feeds. The only duplicates are if there is a different feed. Makes sense. But if its the same feed the TWD file that I import will automatically put any repeater blogs into the TWD folder. At least thats how its working on google reader. For example: I already subscribed to Crazy Delicious Food but after importing the TWD bloglines file (since it was the same feed) it automatically moved my previous subscription of her blog to the TWD folder. Eesh! Hopefully I am not confusing ppl more! LOL.

hey CB… you can actually tag a feed in more than one folder in google reader. just click on the feed name and go to the “Feed Settings” dropdown at the top right. you can click on more than one folder in there and a check will show up next to each one it’s in. when i imported the list, the feeds stayed in their folders (maybe because i had some of them in multiple folders before… not sure what the default behavior is). so they’re not duplicates, but each feed can have more than one folder tag. hope that helps! and thanks to you and Shari for working this out, great stuff! :)

Okay I know I am probably the only one here that does not have Windows or Mac. I have Linux and I am not quite sure what to do. I pull up a list. its actually the whole list of TWD Blogs but there is no obvious way to save it. Am I missing something? Am I doing it wrong? Anyone?

LORI, I am not familiar with linux but basically after you export the file from the bloglines link, you save the file to your desktop, then you can import to whatever reader you have: bloglines, google reader etc and it will save and update all the blogs for you there. Let me know if you need more help, k?